China Sees Space on the High Moral Ground Aaron Rhodes | January 19, 2017 Source: http://providencemag.com/2017/01/china-sees-space-high-moral-ground-xi-jinping-davos-world-economic-forum/ With Europe faltering and a new United States president attacking globalization and international organizations, and vowing to focus on national interests, leaders and experts are concerned about the threat of populism to what they still believe is the liberal democratic world order. In this situation, China has taken center stage. At Davos on January 17, President Xi Jinping spoke of his government’s determination to play a responsible role in defending and contributing to multilateral efforts to “secure peace and reduce poverty.” Xi was applauded for opposing protectionism. All states, he intoned, should “view their own interests in a broader context,” and “refrain from pursuing their own interests at the expense of others.” The contradiction between these positions and China’s program of building military installations on disputed...

NATIONAL REVIEW China, the West, and Leverage By Jay Nordlinger December 16, 2016 Yesterday, I wrote a post headed “The Quiet Death of ‘Liu Xiaobo Plaza.'” It was about the House GOP and its spiking of a move to honor a Chinese political prisoner. In that post, I wrote, My guess is, Republican donors don’t like the idea of “Liu Xiaobo Plaza,” because they want commercial relations with China. They fear that honoring a dissident will endanger commercial relations. I doubt this is so. The Free World has more leverage than it knows. This is something I learned from Jianli Yang, among others: The Free World has much more leverage than it knows. (Yang is a leading Chinese democracy activist and former political prisoner.) The West thinks that China holds all the cards and we have none. So...

A Joint Statement Upon the Establishment of China Human Rights Accountability Center January 10, 2017 On December 23, 2016, President Obama signed into law “The Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act.” The law authorizes the U.S. president to levy sanctions against foreign nationals who engage in the following acts: significant corruption, extrajudicial killings, torture, violation of international human rights covenants, and persecution of those who expose government corruption or seek to defend internationally recognized human rights. The mechanisms it provides to the president to carry out such sanctions include prohibiting or revoking U.S. entry visas or other entry documentation;freezing and prohibiting U.S. property transactions of an individual if such property and property interests are in the United States, come within the United States, or are in or come within the control of a U.S. person or entity. The absence of...

The News Lens Trump’s Unlikely Ally: The Chinese Dissident By: Edward White Why you need to know A high-profile Chinese dissident sees U.S. President-elect Donald Trump as a potential game changer for human rights in China. This March, Donald J. Trump, then standing to become the Republican presidential nominee, drew the ire of three prominent Chinese dissidents after referring to the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre as a “riot,” and praising the “strength” shown by the Chinese government in suppressing the protests. “Trump’s callous dismissal of the tragedy, and his apparent esteem for Beijing’s butchers, left us speechless, in pain and in tears,” wrote Yang Jianli (楊建利), Fang Zheng (方政) and Zhou Fengsuo (周鋒鎖) in a Washington Post op-ed. While Trump’s comment on Tiananmen has probably been largely forgotten by many, swept up in the torrent of Tweets and soundbites flowing from the...